Infrared cameras are well known and increasingly used for a wide variety of applications. As infrared cameras grow in popularity, the ability to manufacture the infrared cameras at high-volume production levels becomes increasingly important.
One limitation with conventional infrared camera manufacturing procedures is that each infrared sensor must be manually inspected to prevent infrared sensors with qualitative visual defects from being sold by the manufacturer. Manual inspection of each infrared sensor is expensive, time consuming, and places a burden on limited production resources (e.g., dedicated personnel and test equipment to sufficiently inspect each infrared sensor). For example, a number of infrared sensor images (e.g., twelve) may need to be viewed by an inspector to determine if a corresponding infrared sensor meets or exceeds the infrared sensor specifications and provides images that do not contain unacceptable visual defects.
Consequently, the ability to provide high-volume, high-quality, and cost-effective infrared camera production is restrained due to the manual inspection requirement. As a result, there is a need for improved techniques for testing infrared cameras